by Will Kohler ·
Published October 18, 2015
· Updated October 18, 2015

Margaret Cho has launched a Twitter tirade against the Philadelphia police department over the light sentences handed down this week for two of the three gay-bashers charged last year in a brutal street attack against a gay couple. Philly police responded that they don’t handle prosecutions. The exchange continued, with Cho complaining that there were no hate crimes charges and the police then informed her that no such law exists in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately while Philly PD was right that they don;t handle prosecutions they were very wrong when they said that no Hate Crime laws exist in Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, PA is a member of this union & since hate crimes against LGBT people are illegal in the United States of America as of October 2009 therefore federal law hate crimes legislation applies.

Federal law banning hate crimes against LGBT people needs to be enforced in every state of this union in order to get federal funding and unless it it enforced it is useless.

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Will Kohler is a noted LGBT historian, writer, blogger and owner of Back2Stonewall.com. A longtime gay activist, Will fought on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic with ACT-UP and continues fighting today for LGBT acceptance and full equality. Will’s work has been referenced in notable media venues as MSNBC and BBC News, The Washington Post, The Advocate, The Daily Beast, Hollywood Reporter, Raw Story, and The Huffington Post

2 Responses

The more so that, the community service the two are getting is at an LGBT community center.

The LGBT community center should refuse to have these gay bashers on its premises, as they are dangerous anti-LGBT bigots. The agreements involving the pleas and the sentencing are only pieces of paper and in themselves do not stop these vicious monsters from acting out against additional LGBTers. The judge who allowed this is a fucking schmuck.

Did you consult with a lawyer before opining on the relevance of federal hate crime legislation in a local prosecution? Because you are wrong – federal legislation doesn’t apply in a state prosecution. Thus the need to continue to seek protections in each state. Not clear to me how a hate crimes statute would have helped here. There were already serious felony charges that were dropped as part of the plea bargain. And why no mention of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams? He and his office are the people one should be complaining to.